Entertainment

If Google wants to boost engagement on Google+, it might want to start by encouraging its own employees to be more active in posting to the social network, according to one new tracking tool.

Nearly one-third of Google employees haven't updated their profiles on Google+ in the past month, according to Google Plus Ghosts, a website that launched this week to track how active Googlers are on Google+. What's more, about a fifth of Google employees haven't posted to Google+ in the past three months, according to the site.

However, the figures don't take into account private updates that Googlers may post to Google+, a fact that one Google spokesperson told Mashable means it is "missing a big part of the picture."

Working strictly off of public posts, Google Plus Ghosts crawled the social network to find more than 2,000 users who have indicated on their Google+ profile pages that they work at Google, and tracks how frequently these profiles are updated.

The website is the brainchild of Yousaf Sekander, director of technology at the UK digital marketing agency RocketMill and the developer behind Social Crawlytics, which tracks URL sharing. Sekander argues that the data from his latest online tool suggests many Google employees aren't exactly big fans of their company's social network.

"Employee engagement on Google+ is discouragingly low," Sekander told Mashable. "If Google employees can’t even muster enough enthusiasm to log onto their own social network every once in a while, what hope is there for ordinary users?"

At the very least, the tool shows just how reluctant many Google employees are to share publicly on the social network.

Google has been criticized in the past for the apparent reluctance of its founders and executives to actively engage on the social network. Indeed, it took the company's executive chairman Eric Schmidt several months just to join Google+.

Overall, Google+ reportedly has about 100 million monthly active users, but several studies have raised doubts about how active these users really are. One report from August found that users on Facebook were seven times more active than those on Google+ and that users on Twitter were 33 times more active.

UPDATE: A rep for Google has clarified that the majority of updates shared on Google+ are private rather than public, which likely influences the results pulled from this online tool.

"The majority of posts shared on Google+ are private. That's been true from the beginning," the rep tells us. "Like any other user, Googlers can post publicly or privately as they like, after all they have circles of friends too. We also have a very active internal version."

Mashable
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